This book explores how white supremacy produces a racialized orientation in our lives, arguing that racism is habituated, enacting within us racialized and racist dispositions and bodily comportments that inform how we interact with others. Thus, eradicating racism requires unlearning racialized habits and cultivating new anti-racist habits.

The title of this collection, The Logic of Racial Practice, pays homage to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who coined the term habitus to name the pretheoretical, embodied dispositions that orient our social interactions and meaningfully frame our lived experience. The language of habit uniquely accounts for not only how we are unreflectively conditioned by our social environments but also how we responsibly choose to enact our habits and can change them. Hence, this collection of essays edited by Brock Bahler explores how white supremacy produces a racialized modality by which we live as embodied beings, arguing that race—and racism—is performative, habituated, and enacted. We do not regularly have to “think” about race, since race is a praxis, producing embodied habits that have become sedimented into our ways of being-in-the-world, and that instill within us racialized (and racist) dispositions, postures, and bodily comportments that inform how we interact with others. The construction of race produces a particular bodily formation in which we are shaped to viscerally perceive through a racialized lens images, words, activities, and events without any self-reflective conceptualization, and which we perpetuate throughout our day-to-day choices. The contributors argue that eradicating racism in our society requires unlearning these racialized habitus and cultivating new anti-racist habits.

Acknowledgments

Foreword – George Yancy

Introduction – Brock Bahler

1. “‘The Talk’: The Transference of Black Body Memory”

Autumn Redcross

2. “Searching for Love in the Age of Trump”

Sarah Adeyinka-Skold

3. “The Asian-American Experience and the White Gaze: On the Potentiality of Naming Oneself from Nowhere”

Nora Tsou

4. “Anger, Silence, and Epistemic Injustice”

Alison Bailey

5. “Implicit Bias and Racialized Seeing: Development, Harm, and Moral Responsibility”

Katie Tullmann

6. “Embodiment & Oppression: Reflections on Haslanger, Gender, and Race”

Erin Beeghly

7. “The Embodied Practices of Whiteness: Unpacking One’s White Supremacist Education”

Brock Bahler

8. “Racialized Habitus in Criminal Immigration Defense Attorneys”

Jessie K. Finch

9. “Three Kinds of Racialized Disgust in Film”

Dan Flory

10. “Disappearance, or, the Neat Punctuation of an Invisible Sentence”

James B. Haile